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Google software engineer Sarah van der Bleek works with her dog, Grace Hopper. Over a million women work in computing and math professions, but tech conference agendas don't fully reflect that reality. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

When word got out last week that Paypal was hosting a panel discussion on gender equality that included only male speakers, public reaction was less than favorable. A statement from a female organizer explaining that the panel was specifically intended to feature “male allies” satisfied nobody, drawing responses such as, “Yeah. I see you could find a woman when you needed someone to take the blame.” And that remark came from a man.

Census data indicates that only 21% of computer programmers are women. Still, 21% of nearly half a million programmers in the United States is a large group of people. And programming is only one of the specialties that is relevant to computing industry events. About 4.4 million people are employed in computing and mathematical professions overall, and a quarter of those people are women. With a pool of more than 1 million women to draw from, the supply should be enough to provide the handful of qualified speakers needed for any tech conference agenda.

Still, that doesn’t mean that no effort is required to attract women speakers. Steven I. Weiss, host of the TV program Up Close, which features interviews with authors, wrote about the challenges of aiming to interview as many women as men. Fewer book authors in the appropriate categories are women than men, but that’s not the only issue. He also found that women authors were less likely than men to have support, from publishers or employers, that would enable them to travel to New York for an interview. To reach gender parity, his staff must work against such systematic bias, so it takes more work for them to schedule interviews with women than men.

In tech, too, we’ve got bias in the system. So, if you’re aiming for gender parity at your tech event, or just to include more female speakers, you’ll actually have to work at recruiting women.

Courtney Burton, founder of MLconf, which included 35% women speakers at its most recent machine learning event (a generous figure for a conference in that specialty), explained the recruiting process. First, organizers select topics to cover. They research each topic, identifying papers, companies and other resources they can use to identify qualified speaking candidates – both male and female. Then they reach out to these individuals and invite them to speak. (MLConf also puts out a call for speakers, and makes a point of spreading the word through groups such as Women in Machine Lerning and Data Science.)

The process is simple in concept, yet not easy to carry out. It takes time and effort. Burton, like Weiss, finds that women face greater obstacles than men, particularly with travel and scheduling. Many of the women invited to speak are academics; working around class and exam schedules can be particularly difficult for them. And for some topics there just seem to be more men than women available.

I’ve written before about the need to include female speakers at tech conferences, and I’ve gotten some nasty responses from certain male conference organizers. Several have complained that women are not submitting proposals to speak at their conferences. I do not doubt that this is true, yet the options for recruiting speakers do not begin and end with open calls for proposals.

One similarity in the processes at Up Close and MLConf: both bring in women (and men, too) by invitation. Recruiting speakers by invitation is not unusual. Most tech conferences recruit some or all of their speakers by invitation, but they don’t necessarily make a point of selecting a diverse group of prospects.

If women are less likely than men to propose talks to some conferences, it’s worth examining the reasons. Several people have commented to me that women might lack confidence in their own work and ideas. Maybe so. On this matter, Courtney Burton has some advice: “Just submit.”

Still, other factors are in play. If you suspect that a conference organizer is biased against you, or you’ve wasted time submitting a proposal and having it rejected before, you might not feel motivated to respond to a call for proposals. I, for one, won’t do that any longer. I’m not willing to tie up dates on my calendar and wait around to see if some unknown conference organizer will like my proposal. It’s a waste of time. But if someone reaches out to me personally with an invitation to speak, I nearly always accept. Perhaps other women have a similar outlook.

Not every comment I hear on this issue is negative. Many men and women express a sincere desire to hear from more female speakers, from members of all races, and from any group whose point of view may be hidden from view today.

There’s also some notable insincerity, as expressed in the popular “I’m-all-for-women-but-won’t-lower-my-standards” mantra. They tell me they’d be delighted to have more women speak, if only women existed who met all the tough criteria they require. How about outlining those criteria, and looking for women who meet them? (A couple of guys did explain their requirements to me, yet many of the men they invited to speak did not qualify.) And how about examining those criteria to determine whether they really represent technical excellence, and not just who’s in the in-crowd?

There’s no longer any satisfactory excuse for failing to include women in all tech events. More than a million women work in computing and math alone, with many more in the broader tech community. Everything you need to reach them – research resources, social media, the telephone and more – is at your fingertips right now. It requires only the will to do so.

I’m author of Data Mining for Dummies, and creator of the Storytelling for Data Analysts and Storytelling for Tech workshops. My work focuses on two challenges: 1) helping technical experts communicate effectively with everyone else, and 2) providing guidance for organizatio...